Phonetics and Phonology in Language Comprehension and Production (review)

The main theme of this book is the integration of insights about both comprehension and production. A second theme concerns the role of detailed phonetic information in language processing, a move beyond traditional psycholinguistic models of the lexicon, which typically assume categorical segment-by-segment representations of words.

In ‘Introduction to the relation between speech comprehension and production’, the editors offer a concise overview of all of the papers in the book. Several contributions focus primarily on the comparison of production and comprehension. In ‘Neighbors in the lexicon: Friends or foes?’, Gary S. Dell and Jean K. Gordon discuss the fact that words in highdensity neighborhoods, that is, words that have many segments in common with other words, are relatively difficult to understand, but easy to produce, and show that Dell’s model of lexical access can account for this fact. In ‘The internal structure of words: Consequences for listening and speaking’, Pienie Zwitserlood reviews evidence from comprehension and production for a morphological level of representation, distinct from syntactic, semantic, or phonological levels. In ‘Modeling the relation between the production and recognition of spoken word forms’, Ardi Roelofs reviews computational models of spoken word production and recognition and argues for a model with separate, but closely linked, systems for word-form access in production and recognition. In ‘Articulatory phonology: A phonology for public language use’, Louis Goldstein and Carol A. Fowler argue that articulatory gestures structure both production and perception. In ‘Neural control of speech movements’, Frank H. Guenther proposes and motivates a neural network model of speechplanning processes from the level of the syllable to the level of motor control. Miranda van Turennout, Bernadette Schmitt, and Peter Hagoort, in ‘When words come to mind: Electrophysiological insights on the time course of speaking and understanding words’, review ERP studies of the time course of semantic, syntactic, and phonological processing and relate these findings to computational models of processing. Núria Sebastián-Gallés and Judith F. Kroll, in ‘Phonology in bilingual language processing: Acquisition, perception, and production’, review evidence suggesting that the use of one language also activates the lexicon and speech sounds in another language in bilingual speakers. In production, words that are related in meaning get activated along with the target word, whereas in comprehension, words similar in sound do. This taskdependence echoes the discussion in Dell and Gordon’s contribution, as well as several of the other papers.

Two contributions directly address the limitations of segment-based representations of phonetic categories. James M. McQueen, Delphine Dahan, and Anne Cutler, in ‘Continuity and gradedness in speech processing’, argue that speech comprehension must involve continuous processing of fine-grained phonetic detail, whereas speech production may comprise discrete processing stages and may rely on more categorical information. James E. Flege, in ‘Assessing constraints on second-language segmental production and perception’, reviews evidence for differences in the representation of phonetic categories in second-language learners and monolingual native speakers, both from production studies and comprehension.

Most psycholinguistic publications take the form of journal articles reporting on new experiments. The contributing authors to this book, very fittingly presented as a better-than-festschrift to Pim Levelt, make excellent use of the opportunity to reflect on the implications of existing findings, taken together.